A peregrine falcon’s prey probably never sees death approach. That’s because a falcon is just so fast — the fastest animal on the planet, capable of reaching speeds of more than 320 kilometers per hour during a nose-dive to attack its chosen meal. That’s faster than a lot of expensive performance cars.

Given the speeds involved in such a dive, it’s not so surprising that these attack moves have proved difficult to study. But a clever experiment with a trained falcon has found that the birds ge...